Chapter 19: Enhanching student preformance through Discipline-based Summarization-strategy Instruction

Chapter 19: Enhanching student preformance through Discipline-based Summarization-strategy Instruction

1. Summary writing; underlying cognitive processes

   • Summarizing text is much like trimming a tree; content at the lower level of importance in the structure of the text is discarded

2. METHODOLOGY

   • Program participants
     • Fifteen at-risk university level frshmen from Spanish-speaking background
   • Program design and rationale
     • Study group in Health Science and Animal Biology
   • Discipline Based Instruction
     • The summarization was discipline based in that it was driven by the demands of the general education courses in which students were enrolled
       • FIRST: The reading selected for summarization
       • SECOND: Intruction was discupline based in that readings
       • THIRD: A goal of instruction was to promote the transfer of strategies learned in the study group
   • Training with awareness
     • Assisted preformance
       • Assisted preformance procedures included
         • Adapting the complexity of the summarization tasks
         • Modeling summarization strategy use as needed
         • Mantaining students level of interest
   • Data collection
     • Students completed a time in class pre and post intervention summarization task on discipline specific articles containing features characteristic of descriptive and comparative texts
   • Data analysis
     • The summary protocols were analyzed in different ways
       • 1. Following the 3 hour norming sessions
       • 2. Diving the total number of main ideas present in the summary by the total number of words
       • 3. Following certain steps to analyze combining and reproducing main ideas
   • Instructional Outcomes
     • Holistic and Main idea Preformance
     • Reproducing and Combination strategies
     • Rhetorical Features